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The Last Car You Would Ever Buy--Literally

Why we shouldn’t get excited by the latest hydrogen cars.

June 18, 2008

Would you buy a car that costs 10 times as much as a hybrid
gasoline-electric, like the Prius? What if I told you it had half the range of the
hybrid? What if I told you most cities didn’t have a single hydrogen fueling
station? Not interested yet? This should be the deal closer: what if I told you
it wouldn’t have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than the hybrid?

Other than the traditional media, which is as distracted by
shiny new objects as my 16-month-old daughter, nobody should get terribly
excited when a car company rolls out its wildly impractical next-generation
hydrogen car. Too many miracles are required for it to be a marketplace winner.

Take Honda’s new FCX Clarity. As the
New York Times reported, “the
cars cost several hundred thousand dollars each to produce,” although Honda’s president
Takeo Fukui “said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as
production volumes increase.”

But why would production volumes increase for a car that
delivers no real value to the consumer and has no significant societal benefit
to motivate government support? Answer: They wouldn’t, so prices may never drop
below $100,000.

And who, exactly, is going to buy a car that can’t easily
find fuel? On the other hand, who is going to build tens of thousands of
fueling stations–price tag $2 million apiece or more–until the cars are
wildly successful? That is the so-called chicken-and-egg problem, which is
especially acute for hydrogen. After all, why should oil companies spend tens
of billions of dollars building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which at
best will take away business from their tremendously profitable gasoline sales,
and at worst will be a complete business loss, assuming, as now seems likely, that
hydrogen cars never catch on?

And yet the media can’t get enough of these hi-tech Edsels. The
New York Times, of all places, writes,

Fuel cells have an advantage
over electric cars, whose batteries take hours to recharge and use electricity,
which, in the case of the United States,
China
and many other countries, is often produced by coal-burning power plants.

Is the Times
unaware that electricity is pretty much available everywhere, whereas hydrogen
is essentially available nowhere? Is the Times
unaware that the per-mile fuel cost of an electric car is probably one-quarter
that of a hydrogen fuel-cell car? Is the Times
unaware that electric-car manufacturers are working on “exchangeable
batteries,” which would make a battery swap about as fast as it takes to
refuel a car with hydrogen?

Most egregious: where, exactly, does the Times think hydrogen comes from? Santa
Claus? More than 95 percent of U.S.
hydrogen is made from natural gas, so running a car on hydrogen doesn’t reduce
net carbon dioxide emissions compared with a hybrid like the Prius running on
gasoline. Okay, you say, can’t hydrogen be made from carbon-free sources of
power, like wind energy or nuclear? Sure, but so can electricity for electric
cars. And this gets to the heart of why hydrogen cars would be the last car you
would ever want to buy: they are wildly inefficient compared with electric
cars.

Electric cars–and plug-in
hybrid cars–have an enormous advantage over hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in
utilizing low-carbon electricity. That is because of the inherent inefficiency
of the entire hydrogen fueling process, from generating the hydrogen with that
electricity to transporting this diffuse gas long distances, getting the
hydrogen in the car, and then running it through a fuel cell–all for the
purpose of converting the hydrogen back into electricity to drive the same
exact electric motor you’ll find in an electric car.

The total power-plant-to-wheels efficiency with which a
hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle is likely to utilize low-carbon electricity is 20 to
25 percent–and the process requires purchasing several expensive pieces of
hardware, including the electrolyzer and delivery infrastructure. The total efficiency
of simply charging an onboard battery with the original low-carbon electricity,
and then discharging the battery to run the electric motor in an electric car
or plug-in, however, is 75 to 80 percent. That is, an electric car will travel
three to four times farther on a kilowatt-hour of renewable or nuclear power
than a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle will.

Top executives
from General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. Tuesday expressed doubts about
the viability of hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market production in the near
term and suggested their companies are now betting that electric cars will prove
to be a better way to reduce fuel consumption and cut tailpipe emissions on a
large scale.

So why do a few car companies persist in rolling out generation after
generation of overhyped Hindenburgs? Maybe it’s because they keep getting so
much free positive publicity.

The Times story includes not a
single critic of hydrogen cars and reads like a Honda press release. The Times opens the story by saying that the
FCX “may have just moved the world one step closer to a future free of
petroleum.” Not quite.

The story does end with some illumination: “For now, the first batch of
customers seem drawn by the car’s novelty as much as anything else.” The same
might be said of the media.

If you build it, the media will come, but don’t hold your breath waiting for
mass-market hydrogen-car buyers. In two years, GM and Toyota have promised to deliver plug-in
hybrids. That will be a real step closer to a future free of petroleum.

Joseph Romm is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. In
the mid-1990s, he helped oversee the Energy Department’s clean-energy programs.
He is the author of the book The Hype about Hydrogen.

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